Never be afraid to paint outside the lines

Author: David (Page 5 of 8)

Khador Extreme Battlegroup

I painted this group several years ago, but it took me a long time to take any decent photos (and even longer to remember that I did and get around to posting them, it seems).

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This group won the best battlegroup award in Privateer Press’s 2014 Gen Con Grandmaster Painting Competition, and appeared in No Quarter 57. Unfortunately the picture taken by Privateer Press at the convention wasn’t that great. You can see it in my battle damage tutorial, which goes over the technique I used to damage the ‘jacks.

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Then again, since it took me over two years to finally take decent photos of my own, I probably shouldn’t be complaining about what Privateer Press could do in the middle of a busy convention. Subtle white shading is hard to photograph, and the metallic work is even harder to photograph.

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I’m really happy with how the metals turned out, especially the axe blades. Since the axes on the extreme ‘jacks are really big and flat, I knew I needed to do something to make them more interesting to look at. Painting them involved a lot of time-consuming back and forth between painting scratches and glazing over everything with inks, but the end result was worth the effort.

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I had half of a hunter lying around from my Caine battlegroup, since I replaced it with a grenadier chassis, and a plastic Cygnar battlegroup box that Privateer Press gave away at Adepticon one year. I thought they would work well as battlefield rubble. Having a well-stocked bits box is a godsend for more ambitious projects.

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Even though the models in this battlegroup are all painted using metallics, I used nmm to paint the destroyed Cygnar models on their bases. I did this for a few different reasons. First, I thought it would be fitting for the destroyed Cygnar jacks to be less shiny than the Khador ones, which were already quite gritty and corroded. Second, I thought it was a nice callback to the Nemo I’d entered in a prior year. And finally, I wanted to show off that I can paint both metallics and nmm (since many painters seem to stick with one or the other).

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This worked well with the extremely scratched effect I did for the turquoise parts, to make the Cygnar ‘jacks look extremely beat up and damaged, but in a completely different way from the Khador ‘jacks.

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To get the bright glowing effect for the ‘jack visors, I first filled them almost entirely with green stuff, since normally there’s a big recess there. It’s very difficult to paint a believable glow effect in a deep recess, since you’re fighting against the shadow that the recess creates. Filling it first makes painting a glow much easier.

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The rust drips are going “down” in different directions. I imagined that the rust would drip down and collect most with the ‘jack in its resting pose, and I tried to imagine what that would be when painting the drips.

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The Khadoran runes on the ‘jacks’ shoulders read “Br’er Fox” and “Br’er Bear,” named after the main antagonists in the traditional Br’er Rabbit stories. The Cygnaran runes on the hunter’s shoulder pad say “Fire.” Warmachine faction fonts can be found here.

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I painted the Juggernaut first, and I think it came out slightly better. Normally the models I paint later, once I’ve figured out my color scheme, turn out better, so this is unusual. But I think playing around with the whites a bit added an extra bit of texture and randomness that worked really well with the effect I was going for. It’s much easier to create randomness by accident than intentionally.

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I painted Sorscha last, and she is much cleaner than the ‘jacks. I imagined the armor of a powerful and important warcaster would be carefully tended, unlike the warjacks.

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I left off the ice-formation base she comes with, since it wouldn’t match the other bases, and instead sculpted something to match, using the head that belongs to the hunter on the juggernaut’s base.

khador_sorscha_3I said in my previous post that I’m planning to teach a class on painting “tricky colors”—white, black, and red—at KublaCon and again at Gen Con. I think I can consider my street cred for teaching that class pretty well established.

What’s going on with the blog?

I guess I’ve been pretty quiet lately. I’m working on competition entries for the summer convention season, and this year I’m going to wait to post them until after the conventions, in order to keep the element of surprise.

In addition to painting, I’ve been working on a couple of longer articles for the blog. One is a two-part article on color theory, which will talk a bit about the science of color, as that’s an element missing from a lot of the color theory articles you see. I’m a big science nerd, so I loved researching it. The text is mostly finished, but I’m also creating some visualizations for it, and the code for generating those is only about half done. So that will take a bit longer.

The other article is on painting tricky colors: white, black, and red. I’ve just started that one, but I want to finish it by KublaCon since I will be teaching a class based on it.

On that note, I will be teaching classes, both at KublaCon and at Gen Con. More on that shortly. I’m going to be teaching my two-brush blending class again, which I’ve now taught several times. It’s great fun to teach and my students seem to get a lot out of it. I’ll also be teaching a class on painting tricky colors, to go with the article.

One last note—I finally got a Putty & Paint account. Check it out at www.puttyandpaint.com/althai.

Abalám

I finished painting this sweet little bust from Hera Models. I might still tweak a few things, so if you have any comments or critiques, please let me know in the comments!

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The more I paint busts the more I find I enjoy them. They are large enough to give you lots of room to work and play with things like textures and freehand, but they still paint up very quickly, and you can focus on the fun bits like the face.

 

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Abalám ended up quite close to my initial vision. There were only two minor changes that happened as I painted. Originally I planned to have an Oni Kanji on his breast plate. I tried painting it three times, once in red, once in black, and once in gold, and each time I decided I wasn’t really happy with it; eventually I ended up just painting over it and bringing back the beaten metal texture I had. The other change was the shirt, which was originally painted as brown leather, then became yellow, then green, before finally ending up as black cloth.

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Unfortunately the large metallic areas make this guy difficult to photograph. This set of photos came from my third attempt. I’m still not entirely happy with them, but they’re a big improvement over the first two sets.

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The lighting study I did before priming him didn’t end up being quite as helpful as I hoped, but I did make some use of it. I wanted the red glow to be much stronger than the one in the study (which was just reflected light from a red coffee mug, not an actual red light source). Still, it’s a useful trick and I recommend it for anyone who has difficulty painting lighting effects.

I’m really looking forward to my next bust!

Steampunk Leia—finished

Sorry I’ve been so quiet lately. The holidays are always a busy time of year, and this will be my last post of the year.

In honor of Star Wars, I’m finally posting the finished shots of Steampunk Leia. I posted the initial WIPs over a year ago, and finished her last summer, but it took a long time to finally post photos. Sorry!

Without further ado, here are the pictures.

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After the second WIP post, I ended up painting over all of the non-metallic metals with metallics. At this large scale, I just couldn’t get NMM that I was happy with. I’m much happier with how the metallics turned out. But my favorite part is the orange light effect – I think I learned a lot about how to pull off a realistic glow effect by trying to execute it at this large scale.

From the workbench: St. Mark on Dragon, part 3

I reached an important milestone since part 2. There’s no more primer showing! There’s still lots of work to be done, but all of the main elements are now in place, so you can see how it all looks together.

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I can’t decide which side is the front of this mini. I’m not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing, but I think it’s good. There’s a lot of energy moving in several different directions, which I think is one of the things that drew me to the mini originally.

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The most obvious change since the last post is the rider of course. Originally, I painted his cloak and pants pink rather than orange. The color worked okay in the color scheme, I think, but I couldn’t get over my societal hangups about pink.

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Fortunately a thin glaze with yellow ink was enough to change the color completely without destroying all of the highlighting and shading, and my careful texturing work.

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The other main change is the addition of pigments to the base. I don’t think it photographs as well now, but it looks way better in person and that’s the main thing. Pigments create a wonderful dusty effect which makes the base look much more realistic as dirt and stone.

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The pigments I used are mostly from the Secret Weapon “wet earth” set, which is somewhat ironic since I created a dry dusty effect using the pigments. Just goes to show you never to take names too seriously, since at the end of the day they are just colors. I used terracotta as the main color for the lit areas and violet (which is an awesome color!) in the shadows, with a few spots of red brick to provide variety.

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I screwed up when I added the pigments, since I added the pigments first, then sprayed the whole mini with dullcoat (which it needed to kill the shine from the inks I used). Unfortunately the dullcoat ruined the lovely dusty effect. I added another layer of pigment, but that pretty much obliterated the highlighting and shading I had done before. So I had to re-paint the highlights and shadows over the pigment, and then add pigments a final time. Oy.

At least thick paint is not much of an issue for the rocks and dirt. But next time it’s definitely dullcoat first, then pigments, rather than the other way around.

A step backwards in time

In honor of “Back to the Future” day, I’m doing some time-traveling of my own.

I started painting miniatures in high school. I acquired an eldar army from a friend-of-a-friend, and painted my first minis with Testor’s enamels. Sadly, these have been lost to time, but I still have the first minis I painted with acrylics.

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They came from the Citadel paints box set, and I painted them to try out my new paints. Needless to say, I quickly fell in love. I may not have had much talent, but I certainly had ambition, going for a legion of the damned color scheme that involved blending yellow into red over a black base-coat. Unsurprisingly, that did not end well.

Anyways, it just goes to show that anyone can end up a good mini painter, if they keep trying long enough.

I wish I could show you the Geocities website I created to show off my painting, but that has become lost to time. Unless someone has a DeLorean I could borrow?

From the workbench: St. Mark on Dragon, part 2

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There’s been a lot of progress since part 1. The dragon body is nearly finished, and I’ve built out the base a bit.

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I haven’t really put any paint on the rider yet, but I converted his arm holding a pistol into binoculars, which involved a fair amount of resculpting.

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The round resin plinth he’s sitting on is only temporary, for holding him while I paint. I’m planning on putting him on a larger wood plinth eventually.

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I’m not sure about the highlighting I did on the back leg in this shot. It doesn’t really make sense from a physics standpoint, but it also provides a sense of energy and motion which I like (and which was inspired by something Alfonso “Banshee” Giraldes said in a class I took from him). I’m going to leave it for now, and see how I feel about it when the rest of the mini is closer to finished.

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On to the rider! I’m off to Google some fabric reference for his clothing, since I still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do with it. I’m thinking about doing something inspired from West Asian or South Asian fabric patterns. I visited the Victoria and Albert Museum in London a couple of weeks ago while traveling for work, and there was a show on the Fabrics of India which got me thinking along those lines.

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